A Drop Of Reality Amid The Fantasy Triggers The Guilt

February 05, 1995|By Barbara Brotman.

From the pages of the current issue of Vogue, I am sorry to say, comes the spectacularly beautiful image of Olatz, the Spanish-born former model and wife of artist Julian Schnabel and mother of their 1-year-old twins.

It is this last part that mars the enjoyment I normally feel while engaging in one of my favorite escapist activities-reading about very wealthy and beautiful people whose lives have no relation to my own.

The gorgeous Olatz, shown en famille in the Schnabels' strikingly appointed New York City home, comes close to fitting my requirements, except for one thing.

Two, really. Namely, her children.

My neurotic logic goes like this: Olatz has two young children. I have two young children. Olatz has money, a cook, high style and cheekbones that look to be sculpted out of marble. I-well, I don't.

In fact, other than the presence of children crawling on the floor, family life in my house looks nothing like hers.

Here, for example, is how Olatz is described in the nursery:

"Thirty-two years old, tall, reed-slim, full-breasted, with glossy dark hair and perfect skin, she is wearing a wisp of a Ralph Lauren navy silk-knit T-shirt, a navy suede Agnes B. microskirt that shows off most of her endless, black-stockinged legs, and a pair of black suede boots."

Yes, that's me getting my girls up in the morning, if you just subtract everything.

Bad enough that we had to deal with the loathsomely unattainable image of Supermom. Now, in advertisements and magazine stories, we must be assaulted with the next guilt-inducing female prototype: Glamor Mom.

You know the ones. The perfume ad model on the beach in the long, tight white shift and cute red bandanna, hefting a baby wearing a matching outfit. Or the one lounging in a bath, laughing with the bare-bottomed model-baby standing next to the tub as a studly model-dad smiles indulgently.

The ones whose family lives look orderly and elegant. The ones whose children are always smiling and clean. The ones, in short, who drive me to distraction by providing images of a life no ordinary mortal can hope to achieve.

Pictures of pouty-lipped models dining al fresco on a Rome piazza have no such effect on me. They are another species. I can no more be expected to look like one of them than to fly like a bird.

But by throwing in a baby, the magazines touch ever so faintly on reality. In so doing, they remind me unpleasantly of how far my reality is from, say, Olatz's.

"A product like perfume is selling not just scent in a bottle; it's selling romance, success, allure, escape, fantasy," he said. "If a commercial portrays life as it is, and it is selling a fantasy, it's not going to work."

But if advertisers create a fantasy that is patently ridiculous, he said, "it becomes absurd. The ad is so bizarrely abstract that the person skims over it, or goes, `Sure, right, phfft-not for me."'

And so it becomes a matter of one's definition of patently ridiculous. Myself, I place the perfect kiddie scenes on about the same point on the scale as Helmut Newton's recent picture of a deathly looking model in towering heels caressing a stuffed swan.

Wearing white while holding a baby-is that woman crazy? Moreover, she obviously could not have given birth to that child-where is her belly? And in the other ad, who is going to clean up the floor when that baby pees?

I say fie on Glamor Moms. Leave the at-home standard of beauty for women with young children at clean sweats and washed hair. I will do my best to live up to it.